Socialism versus Education

To understand the failures of public education, we have to understand the dreams of socialism.

It has always had three main targets it hopes to destroy: family, religion, and private property. These three are the very foundation of civilization for thousands of years. How could you possibly destroy them? Through education, of course. Or perhaps “miseducation” is the proper word.

Control and pervert education, and you can convince the masses that they no longer want what their parents and grandparents wanted so desperately.

Educated people can reflect on what is being done to them. Ignorant people do not know enough to reflect on much of anything. More and more, American students lack basic skills and fundamental knowledge. How can they understand proposals made by politicians, media, and government?

Igor Shafarevich, a famous Russian mathematician, wrote a 1980 book called “The Socialist Phenomenon.” Shafarevich explained that enforced equality was a constant obsession of socialists. To achieve it, they were willing to adopt extreme and indeed murderous measures. Shafarevich “argues that socialism is essentially nihilistic, unconsciously motivated by a death instinct. He concludes that we have the choice of either pursuing death or life.”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn comments in his Foreword: “[Shafarevich] provides us with a rare opportunity of receiving a systematic analysis of the theory and practice of socialism from the pen of an outstanding mathematical thinker versed in the rigorous methodology of his science. (One can attach particular weight, for instance, to his judgment that Marxism lacks even the climate of scientific inquiry.)”

The abolition of private property, which was widely pursued in the Soviet Union and China, caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. (One horrific example: 7 million Ukrainians were starved to death in 1932-33.) These ruthless ideologues were not playing around. Do you think they would hesitate to use any practice whatever that could help them transform the schools?

The big mystery in our public schools has always been the tendency to adopt dysfunctional theories and methods. This is so hard to explain, the average person just throws up his hands in bewilderment.

But stop and think of the drastic goals. Socialists want to take away all the things that give most people their happiness in life. Family. Religion. The property that they have earned by years of hard work. Freedom.

People won’t willingly give up these things. They have to be fooled. Most efficiently of all, they have to be made simpler and less capable of critical thinking. That’s what corrupted Education can do for Socialism.

Ever since John Dewey and his followers took over public education in the 1920s, they consistently pushed what is called Progressive education. “Progressive” was always a synonym for “socialist.” John Dewey wanted to use the public schools to create a new kind of citizens, people who would accept a new kind of country. A socialist country. But educators obsessed with social engineering stop caring about the academic and intellectual aspects of school. Arguably, progressive education means the end of real or traditional education.

But social engineering goes deeper than harming academics. It attacks the character and soul of the students.

In 1920, Winston Churchill wrote a long newspaper article regarding the recent Bolshevik victory in Russia: “[T]his world-wide revolutionary conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played…a definite recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworlds of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of the enormous empire.”

Three of Churchill’s phrases shout at us: arrested development, envious malevolence, and impossible equality. Some would say that public schools push these messages whenever they can. Too many educational decisions are made for ideological reasons.

What is to be done? Common Core, often referred to as Commie Core, wants more power in Washington, DC, when the opposite goal is what every citizen should want. Parents have no hope of influencing schools run by a far-off federal government.

Education was always understood to be a liberation, a way for the human race to improve itself and become more free. Nothing has changed. We need more and better education; the Education Establishment continues to promote counterintuitive obstacles. The world’s gotten very complicated. If citizens are to keep up with that complexity, they must first learn to read, write and count. Then they must learn the facts and knowledge that a capable citizen needs to know. To fulfill its mission, public education has to be free from political corruption.